Contaminated foods distributed through, regional, national, or international distribution systems can pose serious health risks for large numbers of people. The contamination can be accidental or deliberate. Once contaminated food has been discovered or suspected, immediate action is necessary to avoid spreading the contamination to a wider population.
Currently, food-tracking systems, particularly for fresh fruit and vegetables, are generally inadequate to precisely identify and isolate potentially contaminated produce. Sometimes, the only recourse is to recall or otherwise destroy the entire inventory of a distributor responsible for one or more brands. Back-tracing shipping records of food products from sales outlets to a common source is time consuming, and the records themselves may lack enough information to identify the particular fields, farms, or growers from which the produce originated. Retailers and consumers may have no choice but to discard all food products from a distributor that have the potential of being contaminated. In the event of a contamination outbreak, the cost to distributors can be very high. Even in the absence of any sort of outbreak, the risk to distributors over the potential loss of their inventory of a food product is ever-present.